Mzalia News

Many times over the years I have heard people say that once you give away full time work, you are busier than you have ever been before.

I can relate to that!

Since giving up work 12 months ago to start my own business (where I only planned to work part time hours), I certainly feel that way!

But now, I feel almost like an employee of the Basenji Club of New South Wales!

I have been doing a lot of work for them in recent months including the coordination of a group submission for the Fanconi DNA Linkage Test in the USA, as well as working on putting together the latest update to the Basenjis in Australasia Pedigree Book.

In addition to this, I am also the Club Historian!

It’s funny isn’t it – given that I live in South Australia!

At least the coordination of the Fanconi submission will be completed by mid July. The pedigree book will be hanging around for a little longer yet.

What is the “Basenjis in Australasia” Pedigree Book???
Back in the mid 1970′s there was a joint project between the Basenji Clubs of Victoria and New South Wales to put together a pedigree book where (for a small fee), owners could have a page in the book for their dogs including owner details, pedigree and a photo.

After the release of the first book, subsequent books were released every 3 to 5 years by the Basenji Club of New South Wales, for the new dogs that had entered the show ring.

The Champion of these books had been the late Lauris Hunt of Pukkanut Basenjis fame. She spent many hours maintaing the database and collating all of the information for each update of the book.

I became involved in the project when the 2002 update was being put together. Due to a problem with a software upgrade, the database the Lauris had stored all of the information on had become corrupted. When I got involved with the showing and breeding of basenjis back in the mid 1990′s, I had bought all of the previous pedigree books, and put them into my own database so that I could do my own pedigree research.

I was only too happy to help Lauris out with a copy of my data! The pedigree book is such a valuable resource – especially to those people new in the breed, as they can see the photos and pedigrees of our great dogs from the past that are behind our wonderful kids of today.

Since Lauris’ sad passing, I am only too happy to carry the torch and continue this project. With so many Australian and New Zealand bred basenjis and their offspring doing so well on the world stage, it is important to keep this book alive.

The version that I am currently completing is the first computerised version which will be available on CD-Rom. All of the dogs from the previous books have been converted across, plus there are over 200 new dogs giving a total of nearly 1000 dogs on the CD in total!

Each of the pedigrees on the CD is in html (or web page) format, and have links in their pedigrees to other dogs that can be found on the CD.

The expected release date for Basenjis in Australasia On-Line is October this year – in line with the Basenji Club of NSW 40th Anniversary Championship Show.

Tags:

This entry was posted by Karen on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Other Basenji News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.